In the summer of 2001, citizens in Inkster contacted MEC to ask for help in protecting a 12-acre oasis of green in the heavily-urbanized western Wayne County suburbs. We reported in the October 2001 edition how MEC helped the group, Citizens United for Action (CUFA), obtain scientific and legal support to defend the site. But state officials refused to intervene, citing a technicality in state wetland law, and local officials hurried to develop the site. CUFA member Darryl Braun expresses here some of the anger citizens across Michigan have felt in recent years as government has failed to do its job to protect our wetlands and natural heritage.

The infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre took place in a Chicago garage on February 14, 1929. Seven men were savagely mowed down by the machine guns of rival gangsters in an event that instantly characterized the savage day of the gangster.

Seventy-three years later to the day, an event equally savage and nauseating took place...a new St. Valentine's Day Massacre. To be certain, it will not garner the notoriety or outcry of the original massacre, but maybe it should. It is also disturbing.

This massacre took place in our own back yard, in a beautiful forest in a corner of the City of Inkster on the Dearborn Heights border. The revolving steel blades of giant construction vehicles mowed down the victims of this massacre. And the victims numbered not seven, but hundreds, many of them hundreds of years old.

Unlike Chicago, the victims in Inkster were not corrupt criminals. Though huge in stature and imposing, they were gentle, yet majestic giants that nurtured life rather than taking it away. That's right: the victims of the Inkster St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 2002 were trees!

We who knew the victims intimately and loved them were forced to witness their gruesome deaths. Where we envisaged the vibrantly green color in which these natural artists painted themselves, the slayers saw only the tantalizing green of the dollar they lustfully pursue.

Where we heard the soft, whispering wind through the victim's branches and the soothing songs of the birds they comforted, the destroyers heard only the bells of cash registers, the jingle of change and the roar of the engines that propelled their devouring weapons of destruction.

There is sad irony in referring to these developers as builders. In truth, they are destroyers. They are defiling the most wondrous and awe-inspiring spectacles on this planet...trees. Trees that comprise great forests. Trees that provide shelter and food for an incredible variety of animal denizens. Trees that offer the human species not just aesthetic pleasure, but life itself, for they are an indispensable component in the supply of the oxygen that allows us to breathe.

I am not ignorant of the necessity of development. We need houses in which to live, stores in which to shop and offices in which to work. However, unrelenting urban sprawl is not the answer. We do not need to develop every foot of land. There is a great deal of blight and vacant buildings, lots and houses in Inkster. The City's priority should be the redevelopment and rehabilitation of these properties, and most importantly, in an area that offers far too few woodlands in which to partake of nature's wondrous beauty, the forested site at the corners of Cherry Hill and Beech Daly Roads should have served as a breathtaking legacy around which the future of the City could experience a renaissance. That opportunity has sadly vanished.

What might have been most reprehensible about the bloody reign of the destroyers was the tendency of the police to overlook, or even facilitate the corruption, all the while maintaining the image of being genuinely concerned with enforcing the law and punishing criminal activity. This dereliction of duty made the massacre possible.

Similarly, DEQ officials charged with the responsibility of enforcing environmental regulations are too often guilty of overlooking-or even facilitating-the skirting of those regulations and, indeed, did so in the 2002 Massacre.

A woman resides in a home at the end of the lane leading into the now destroyed woodland. Every day for the past 13 years, she had walked through the forest, taking in the flora and fauna around her, contemplating and appreciating the gorgeous tapestry of life.

It was not just a beautiful woodland the St. Valentine's Day 2002 massacre wiped out but also a solemn house of worship. That is their ultimate shame-and the shame of that concept we humans arrogantly call progress.