Dear neighbors,

Those of us who have come to feel that this is a critical issue in the history and quality of life in Ithaca and our community, want to explain why, and hope my neighbors will see why so many faculty, students and the city of Ithaca (as well as our Assembly representative) strongly oppose the CU administration's proposed destruction of the woods for a parking lot.

There is, on the western rim of the campus, a de facto green belt of which Redbud Woods is a vital part. It is on the historic estate of Robert Treman, a founder of the NY State park system. The estate was designed by Warren Manning, a student of Frederick Law Olmstead. Manning's principle was that "nature is the best gardener" and he advocated the value of wild forests, with only selective pruning of undesirable plants. The estate was left to Cornell to keep as a natural area. Cornell violated the trust of the Treman family with its plan to destroy the woods and pave it, and that action has been strongly protested by the Treman family.

The Cornell administration has also violated the interests and feelings of the City of Ithaca and the adjoining residential community, and fought the city in court in two different lawsuits to override the opposition of the city and the historic preservation organization. When the residential community adjoining the woods on University Avenue organized to secure historic status (like we in Forest Home did) in order to be able to limit unwanted development, Cornell fought to block that as well.

University Hill neighborhood residents value the forested hill opposite them for its natural beauty, the home it gives to birds and small animals, and for its enormous water-absorbing functions. A huge concrete parking lot will mean, even with the plan modifications Cornell has made to channel some of the water, a great increase in runoff water. One of Cornell's imminent forest ecologists, Tom Whitlow, has told us that when 10 % of a watershed (like the main campus hill) becomes covered with impermeable surface, there are serious ecological consequences in flooding and erosion. That figure has probably been reached already, and the destruction of the woods and its paving will undoubtedly increase the ecological damage.

The ostensible purpose of the new lot is to provide parking for students and a small number of staff, and to enable faculty to visit the new West Campus (WC) dorms. The 377+ Cornell faculty members who signed a petition against the destruction of the woods, the 43-member Redbud Faculty Working Group (RFWG), the City of Ithaca residents and officials, University Hill community residents, and c. 25 Cornell student and Ithaca protesters have spend the last two months working intently to develop alternatives to replacing Redbud Woods with a parking lot. It is clear that Cornell cannot go on paving green space to accommodate exponentially increasing automobile traffic without doing severe ecological damage, displacing costs onto the community below University Avenue, increasing the heat radiation and ugliness associated with parking lots, and hypocritically violating its much ballyhooed commitment to "sustainability."

Alternatives to paving include offering free bus passes to students who don't bring their cars to campus, restoring the old ban on freshman parking, building UP on existing lots (like the ugly construction parking lot behind the 660 Stewart coop, the existing lots on Williams St., behind the law school, and behind Willard Straight). We have also recommended better walking and biking paths, incentives for car-pooling and shared spaces, and other measures. We have circulated a study of the effort at UCLA to limit driving on campus. By the simple measure of providing free bus passes, UCLA reduced the demand for parking spaces by 20 % in the first year. If we added a ban on freshman parking, which many universities have, we could certainly reduce parking demand by far more than the 176 spaces in the projected parking lot. We have also located spaces for temporary construction parking needs in various places, including Libe slope and the huge A and B lots.

In addition, 60 members of the faculty group submitted creative proposals for ways that they would become involved in the West Campus dorms (for example, Prof. Tom Whitlow would adopt the Redbud Woods as his class project in urban forestry), and we all pledged to do this WITHOUT driving to the dorms.

One of the Faculty Redbud group, a professor of city and regional planning, has told us that in studies of the position of universities in their larger communities, the consensus is that the worst type of boundary between town and campus is a wall; the second worst is a parking lot. On the other hand, what we have now (at least for another day or two) is a beautiful wooded area that is a permeable natural boundary beloved to both city neighborhoods, students, and faculty. Other campuses, like Berkeley and the University of Indianna, have maintained such urban woodland boundaries, and they are beloved natural areas for both campus and city.

Cornell could have a special niche in higher education by nurturing the unparalleled natural beauty that surrounds us, and supporting more strongly ecological programs that have been weakly supported in the past 5 years. Instead, some Cornell officials have stated that they hope to attract students by advertising that they can bring their cars here and park in convenient locations. We think that is a great miscalculation. Good students are much more likely to be attracted by academic offerings and programs addressing growing concerns with global warming and loss of green space, and by a university that PRACTICES what it preaches by minding its imprint on the local environment. We could also educate our students to the physical fitness advantages of walking and biking. No other peer institution allows cars on central campus to the extent we do, so it is unlikely we are going to lose good students to other ivy league schools because of opportunities to drive and park on central campus.

We urge you to visit our web site, http://redbudwoods.org for further information, and some of the many papers the RB working group have presented to the administration in defence of Redbud Woods. Under pressure of forceful removal from the woods, the student and community environmentalists who have occupied the woods on and off for several weeks have today agreed to abandon the woods. But students, faculty and community groups and local officials are hoping against hope that President Rawlings will change his mind and spare the woods.

In order to get the students out of the woods, the administration has offered to institute an experimental bus pass program for two years. We believe this would demonstrate the validity of our arguments about the advantage of limiting the demand for parking rather than paving over more and more green space. But we need time for that to happen. Last Tuesday, Professor Tom Eisner, one of Cornell's most distinguished biologists, and Paul Houston, chaired chemistry professor and associate dean, presented President Rawlings with a proposal for a six-month moratorium on destruction of the woods and creation of a task force appointed by the president to study alternatives to paving the woods and issue a report by Jan. 15 which he could accept or reject. We believed this was an immanently reasonable proposal, and were frankly shocked when the president and VP Susan Murphy summarily rejected it the following day and began fencing the woods (even as we met with them). Throughout the past three years the administration has said many things that were misleading or simply untrue. For example, VP Murphy told a faculty-student group that Cornell was required by the City of Ithaca to build the lot to accommodate campus needs. At the same time, she was certifying to the city that Cornell had more than enough parking spaces to meet the city requirement EVEN WITHOUT the Redbud lot. (The city sent us a copy of that affidavit). The administration has described the woods as "an overgrown lawn" full of "invasives." In fact, there are a few invasive plants there that could easily be removed, but most of the trees are black walnuts and redbuds (which are NOT classified as invasives), and there are some magnificent and locally rare trees and plants in the woods (see the species list compiled by Prof. Ken Mudge, at the redbud web site). A few days ago construction workers smashed two plants that are on the NY state endangered species list, and that had been circled with a small protective fence.

As long as the woods has not been destroyed (beyond the trees cut down on June 6, which mar the entry), we desperately hope to save it. If you read the documents and lists of biology, planning, horticulture, and other faculty who are pleading for the saving of Redbud woods, and agree that it must not be destroyed, please write or call President Hunter Rawlings (hrr6), VP Susan Murphy (shm1) and Provost Biddy Martin (cam18) as soon as possible. Time is of the essence. Once the woods is cut down, it will be gone forever. And traffic through Ithaca's neighborhoods will continue to increase.