To the Editor:

People for Princeton Ridge, Inc., wishes to thank Sustainable Princeton and its nominating committee for honoring us with one of its awards for 2011. We also wish to thank the hundreds of Princeton residents who supported us during our negotiations.

We have been part of a remarkable collaboration between private citizens, municipal officials, and business people. We thank our co-recipients — Township attorney Ed Schmierer for his hours of text-work and advice; we thank developer Bob Hillier not only for his donation of 17 acres of land for open space but for his eagerness to redesign his plans with the public interest in mind (using more clustered buildings, thus leaving fully 80 percent of land as open space). Together, we all reached a common understanding: a healthy environment is an economic as well as civic benefit to the welfare of our habitat and all its creations, including the trees, the rocks, and the eastern box turtle — who cannot speak for themselves, whose languages we must learn. The Princeton Ridge Preserve, adjoining the property we all worked so hard to achieve an environmentally smart use of land, testifies to the power of collaborative efforts, needed now more than ever.

We have all benefitted from the direction and enthusiastic oversight that Sustainable Princeton has been providing. The sheer number of awards made this year shows the important work being done by all our citizens, many of them representing civic collaborations. But there is more work to do.

Princeton is virtually built-out; few properties remain to develop. One of them is a 98-acre parcel on Herrontown Road (Block 1001), more or less across the street from the new Westerly Road Church site that is soon to be unwisely decimated. This tract is part of the environmentally sensitive Princeton Ridge: heavily wooded, with steep slopes. We hope that any developer will honor both the natural habitat land and the public interest of the community by setting aside as much open space as possible, respecting the area’s natural features (not interfering with the steep slopes), and by using clustered development to achieve these ends.

PPR hopes that the present owner and the likely developer will heed the splendid collaboration between municipal, civic, and business interests that enabled us to achieve the creation of the Princeton Ridge Preserve — and will, by proper consultation with municipal officials, choose to respect the public interest.

Let us all collaborate in preservation and recycling. Let us end the habits of waste and unnecessary destruction.

Daniel A. Harris, Jane Buttars

People for Princeton Ridge, Inc.