They Tried to Pave Paradise

The following year, a contract went up for bid that detailed plans to expand Center Drive. On its surface level, this didn't cause concern. But people became angry upon learning the excess dirt and rock will go into the Nature Preserve to create playing fields that would support the Hinman living community. Creating extra parking for the quickly expanding campus also became an option. Since the university first acquired the land that the preserve sits on from the state, both parties intended to have an area for the campus to expand to if need be. What they did not account for was public backlash to the plan. Mass protests that stretched even beyond members of the Binghamton community ensued in response to the construction. Dylan Horvath, the current Nature Preserve overseer, recalled from a story told to him by someone at the protests that even, “the wife of the then SUNY Chancellor at the time came down to stand in front of the bulldozers.” Altogether, approximately 300 people participated in this protest against the construction.

Three months later, the construction stopped completely. The area would be kept a forest and then turned into the preserve that it is today. Once the university decided that the area would be permanently used for geological and biological studies, the planning went quickly. By April of 1970, the President of the University, G. Bruce Dearing, along with a committee focused on the environment surrounding the university, proposed and approved the boundaries of the nature preserve. That December, the Nature Preserve became official. Richard Jarvis, who became the overseer of the preserve/campus forester, stressed that the preserve would maintain its natural identity and the only human presence on it would be from the hiking trails put into place. Jarvis felt confident that the trails would keep the human damage to a minimum. He explicitly stated that there no camping or anything else unnatural to the area would occur.

Since the official introduction of the Nature Preserve in 1970, its upkeep has not only been done by overseers such as Dylan Horvath. Members of the community and students of the school have also helped to positively impact the area. For example, on Earth Day in 1972, Richard Jarvis and a team of students worked to plant more than 1000 trees in areas of the preserve that were undergrown and lacked biodiversity. The university has also been slowly acquiring more land in the wilderness surrounding the preserve and leaving it undeveloped. Today, the university owns approximately 600 acres of land that are not officially part of the preserve but also are not built upon and there are no current plans to build upon them.