Commentary: Preserve Blue Hills

By Guest

Dear Editor:

The Blue Hills Reservation is a 7,000-acre green oasis in an urban and suburban environment less than three miles from my house. Within those hills is the Blue Hills Trailside Museum and the Blue Hill Weather Observatory and Science Center, a National Historic Landmark — places visited by more than 200,000 residents annually. Yet $600,000 in state funding for these treasured facilities sits on the cutting room floor of Governor Baker’s 2017 budget.

In the meantime, the governor is actively planning for you to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance another deer hunt in the Blue Hills. Last year, as part of a deer culling process, we paid $2,300 per deer to shoot 64 of them in the Blue Hills area.

Is this how we want to be spending our tax dollars?

From the founding of the Blue Hills Reservation in 1893 until last year, hunting had not been allowed. For more than a century, the Blue Hills had been a sanctuary to visiting families and to wildlife. Last year, the state planned a hunt to cull the alleged overpopulation of deer. Nearly 200 hunters were given four days and permission to kill four deer each — almost 800 in total. They killed 64. Are those results from poor marksmanship or poor counting in the first place? It makes me wonder if the deer population really needs culling at all. But the state wants to try again, this time with six days of hunting, now with guns as well as bows and arrows.

Let’s not give them the chance. The Blue Hills Reservation is our sanctuary in our community and in our backyard. We need to preserve it. We need to protect the wildlife and the treasures like the Trailside Museum and the Blue Hill Observatory and Science Center that exist to educate and enrich our lives and the lives of our children.

Write to the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR), to the governor, to your state senators and representatives. To learn more, attend a public meeting on Tuesday, August 2, at 6:30 p.m. at Blue Hills Regional Technical School in Canton. Voice your concern on how your tax dollars are being spent in the Blue Hills.

Sincerely,

Julie Beckham

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