Charlie Burton, my brother-in-law, was part of the team who came up with the Natural State slogan. But do we deserve it, or is it like the Bear State, which was abandoned after we killed off nearly all the bears?
Not yet. We still have a lot of natural Arkansas: Our beautiful Buffalo National River, Champagnolle Creek in Calhoun County, and Big Island in Desha County, to name a few.
We must continue to protect what we have and add to what makes the state natural. Let's begin with the Arkansas Department of Transportation. U.S. 167 passes through downtown Hampton in south Arkansas. The highway is being widened and improved, and ArDOT has included a sidewalk and planting area along the portion that goes through the center of town.
Let's not be limited to filling the planting area with grass. How about crape myrtles every 15 feet?
Regarding highway mediums and interchanges: Plant something! Anything! And don't offer excuses about safety, because unless New York and a host of other states aren't in a parallel universe, they're planting thousands of trees and other vegetation along highways, interchanges, and in medians.
Some towns are doing absolutely nothing. Others are adding to public areas with trees, trails, and other natural improvements. Yet some cities are reversing the progress made over the past several decades.
The El Dorado Municipal Code is absent any mandatory landscaping or tree ordinances. In the past, downtown landscaping was under the direction of Union Square Improvement District and later the El Dorado Tree Board. That arrangement resulted in over 1,000 downtown trees, 40 sidewalk floral planters, eight large courthouse planters, and 20 wire baskets hung from streetlight poles. The city was a partner in the planting, replacement, and upkeep of these items. Today, that cooperation is a thing of the past.
Currently, the City of El Dorado is taking a step backward to the dismal 1960s by not replacing dead trees, reducing the density per city block, and cutting down or severely pruning existing trees. The City Tree Board hasn't met in several years, and when new trees were planted around the new Haywood Hotel after the 20- to 30-foot-tall trees were removed during construction, they were two- to three-foot seedlings posing as street trees.
I offered to replace the pitiful little sprouts with proper autumn blaze maples, but got no response. That attitude is prevalent in our state and boils down to an approach that discounts trees and attractive landscaping as essentially worthless fluff.
Another example is resistance to change. Fayetteville and Bentonville, forward-looking cities with excellent landscaping and tree ordinances, should be a model across the state. Their commitments to interlinking trails are excellent additions to their communities' appeal.
I sent copies of their ordinances to the El Dorado mayor and city council members and asked them to put both ordinances on the council's agenda for discussion. They didn't even bother to recognize that I had sent the ordinances.
Entrances to cities should come high on the list of items that will build our Natural State image, and when a town in the desert such as Santa Fe can have greener-looking entrances than almost any of ours, we know we have a way to go before our entrances look inviting. I offered to plant 100 crape myrtles along one of El Dorado's ugliest entrance routes, but was told no.
I've visited Scottsdale, Ariz., a number of times, and it proves you don't need 40-foot lighted signs to tell customers you have fast food joints or anything else. A good city sign ordinance can be designed to add to the image of the Natural State.
Another suggestion is to add greenery to the thousands of parking lots in our state. Probably 90 percent of our incorporated towns will let developers cover a city block with asphalt and not plant a blade of grass. National surveys have shown landscaped parking lots in shopping centers have 20 percent more customers than similar shopping centers surrounded by bare asphalted lots.
Our National Buffalo River would still have a hog farm on its watershed if thousands of Arkansawyers hadn't hammered the governor and the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality with hog farm removal letters. It's obvious we need to keep pressing for other changes, or we won't be the Natural State much longer.
Correction from my last Sunday's column: "The Last Supper" in Milan was painted by Leonardo da Vinci, not Michelangelo.
Email Richard Mason at [email protected].