On Growth and Stargazing

It was near midnight on a moonless night, and the puppy was pulling hard on the leash when I looked up.

The sky, black as jeweler's velvet, was scattered with stars sparkling like diamonds, twinkling even, like in the children's song. This sky, I thought, might not look like this for much longer.

Subdivisions are growing out of the hills around my Mount Dora home faster even than the weeds in my garden. Soon, it occurred to me, this black-sky star view could be grayed and muted by the streetlights in these new communities, by the glow of security lights sent heavenward. Light pollution, stargazers call it.

Change is inevitable, but accepting that fact doesn't make it any easier to cope with. Our daughter, the one who just yesterday, or so it seems, climbed onto the school bus for her first day of kindergarten, is college bound. The next daughter, a first-grader, will be there 12 years hence, God and the fates willing.

And the land around us seems to be changing even faster than our children grow. Houses now sit where my family used to picnic when I was a child, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows on whittled palmetto branches.

I recently wrote about the plans for a huge community near Jacksonville on land where my dad took me squirrel hunting when I was about nine. After having me haul out the morning's two-squirrel kill by their tails, he let me drive his Dodge pickup down the dirt roads, leaving crooked tire tracks in our wake.

My first reaction to the developer's plan was sadness for loss of the wilderness of my childhood. Then I looked deeper. The developer had already deeded miles of land along the Intracoastal Waterway to the county for a park. There'll be paths and smaller parks throughout the community, making it pleasant and easy for residents to walk or bicycle to its many amenities.

The community I grew up in nearby didn't have sidewalks, which was probably fine since the only amenity around was a convenience store. This new community looks like a place I'd like to live and raise my children.

Over the years, I've seen a lot of change resulting from the continuous wave of people moving to my native state. I remember when developers, reluctantly, were forced to leave wetlands untouched.

But it didn't take long before they realized that they could charge a premium for homes overlooking these "preservation areas." What buyers really want, it seems, is to be near places where they can spot a heron spearing a fish or an osprey building a nest.

There are communities being developed now where half or more of the land is preserved in its natural state. In the Osceola County community of Harmony, the developer is doing something unheard of in Florida's long and sordid development history: Nobody will be living on the lakes. Their shores are left wild.

And in Harmony, where you can still see the Milky Way from the new town square, streetlights are shielded to prevent light pollution from spoiling the star views.

That's the kind of development it's hard for even the most avid naturalists to get upset about. There, at least, future generations of stargazers will still be awestruck at what they see overhead.

Teresa Burney is associate editor of Big Builder magazine and a contributing writer to Orlando Homebuyer.