In a year-end interview, PennFuture's president, Cindy Dunn, highlights the importance of preserving the integrity of the Allegheny Front in 2015 and beyond. The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission's potential plans to cut a six-lane gash through Whitehorse Mountain, part of the Allegheny Front, threatens one of our state's most beautiful and important landscape features. Referring to the possibility of the Turnpike Commission cutting a notch out of the top of the mountain, instead of fixing or expanding the existing tunnel, Dunn says an open cut...
"would have a devastating environmental consequence. It'd be removing a big piece of the mountain. We're working with the local hunting and fishing club there whose land would be destroyed. We think this has important value to biodiversity and these mountaintop ridges are important migratory pathways...plants need ways to expand."
Valessa Souter-Kline is western Pennsylvania outreach coordinator for PennFuture and is based in Pittsburgh. She tweets @ValessaSK.
