“Our first task must be to do no harm”

By Adam Stevenson

In Purcellville one is surrounded by a certain spatial gravity system—there are pulls emanating from the east: towards the suburbs of Leesburg, Ashburn, and Sterling; from the west and the Blue Ridge, Shenandoah River, and the Alleghenies on the other side; north from Lovettsville and Frederick, Maryland; and south, more ambiguously, from Marshall, Manassas, or Culpeper.

This spatial gravity system is connected to the more immediate constellation of human settlement encircling Purcellville. Places to which we are connected by their palimpsest of history and culture. There are the old W&OD railroad towns of Hamilton, Round Hill, and Bluemont; Middleburg and Aldie on the Gap Turnpike; the African American villages of St. Louis and Arcola, and the Quaker villages of Waterford, Lincoln, and Hillsboro.

It may also be useful to consider the measuring spatial gravity. Is the gravity to be measured by the affection one has for the place, or the use one has for place?  The (cliche) answer is probably both. But there are times when usefulness gives way to crude convenience. Times when places become another good to use and then use up. If we tend to have such a belief about places, if we use them like any other expendable resource, it is usually as a natural result of a common paradigm in which everything happens, firstly and foremostly, in the marketplace.

The issue here, though, is not the existence of the marketplace. The issue here is that the marketplace has increasingly consumed all of our other places, inhibiting our ability to consider the idea of place deeply. Every place offers itself anew to our imagination. But in return for this favor, we must take upon ourselves certain obligations toward the place. We must consider our place in the world deeply, and have a “place in mind.”

If we allow our places to be eaten up by careless development and if we construct too many roads to nowhere—in the sense that our roads become linkages to the same sorts of places we fled—it is because we have expended too little collective energy to think in and through our place.

To translate these theoretical concerns into something more (literally) concrete, let’s consider the proposed interchange at the intersection of Hillsboro Road and Rt. 7 at the northern boundary of the Town of Purcellville.

The construction of such an interchange at this location would lead to the clear-cutting of roughly 5-7 acres of woodland bordering Catoctin Creek, though the interchange would not only level this wooded area, but also increase development pressure along the interchange area as the space around the interchange becomes more valuable to commercial interests and induced demand boosts use of both the highway and Hillsboro Road.

In effect, the lost woods here would be only a down payment on future woods and fields to be laid waste and offered as offering to the deity of “development.” Though it’s true that we can’t preserve every single tree and blade of sedge in western Loudoun, we should only be willing to settle for good and honest trades.

A good and honest trade means that in restitution for the violent act of transmuting the “natural preconditions” of the site of development to something fashioned to our own needs, we try to create something we can be proud of and something ethically defensible.

But in this case, instead of a good and honest trade, we will exchange woodland for tired tropes. Appropriately, we have ill-fitting arguments for ill-fitting structures. The common method of such an argument is to assert that such infrastructure is economically predetermined using opaque language calculated to neutralize potential resistance. Such an argument also often resorts to bureaucratic language in order to emotionally distance those in positions of authority from the acts of violence they propose while lending an air of legitimacy to the project.

But what should we do, apart from participating in local politics and registering our disapproval of this proposed interchange? I believe our first task must be to withdraw (as much as possible) from systems of destruction and refrain from activities that, when multiplied by millions or more, accrue to harm at a distance.

Some may see such individual action as futile, but I believe the real problem is a socialization in which individual action is dismissed as irrelevant. The task of building an environmentally and economically sustainable community is, of course, not only a question of opting out of the destruction but of opting in to the consecration of place and settling down for a life of responsibility and obligation toward it.

We must accept the ontological priority of what is most immediate. It is the obligation and privilege to love our immediate surroundings that moves me to oppose the proposed interchange, and I would encourage all readers to examine your own responsibilities toward place as well, and then to follow those obligations faithfully.

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Adam Stevenson grew up in Purcellville and is interested in sustainable urban planning, local history, and Loudoun’s flora and fauna.